Like The Dude, I Abide

The chaos was not quite as bad today. I did have some periods of time where I got some actual work done. That's always a good feeling. If I had one principal complain about the high work rhythm it's that there never seems to be an end or a sense of completion. It is like fighting the ocean, there is always another wave coming.

Our wave crested on Monday. They announced that our current director would be leaving at the end of the month and we were being moved into an already existing organization. Continuity matters when it comes to organizational effectiveness. I have to say, honestly, that I've never had good continuity at the upper leadership levels since I have been with the evil corporation for 19 years. The average director seems to last maybe a year and a half. Oddly enough the director that lasted the longest was pretty horrible, both as a professional and as a person. Maybe that's what it takes to survive the Game of Thrones in corporate America.

I keep my head down and I keep working and I move in the shadows. Damn, I sound like some kind of corporate ninja. The sad thing is that from my point of view the director we just lost was actually one of the better ones. She knew the business, she knew the functions, and she seem to be a decent human being. Now, I know nothing about the new director, he's relatively new so I have my fingers crossed that he's at least as good. We'll find out!

One advantage I have is that I'm already across the threshold for early retirement. So, to a degree, I could care less what happens. If things turn bad I just move on and start the next chapter of my life. It's a very good position to being. Knowing where the escape hatch is and having my parachute on lessons the stress significantly. It does not make it vantage, I think the working world will always carry a layer of stress with it, but it makes the impact less because I have options.

So the sun keeps rising, the moon keeps falling, the tides come and go, and in the land of flying monkeys, like The Dude I abide.

Suddenly, the Absurdity of It

I've written a couple of times in the recent past about work (though, as usual, I write vaguely, so as to protect both the innocent and the guilty). Let me summarize real quick - lately, one of the people I report up into has been causing me some degree of anxiety, for a variety of reasons.

It is the usual corporate inanity that influences tens of thousands of workers in tens of thousands of jobs, so there really isn't anything spectacular about it. I am a firm believer that all people are distributed on a bell curve and some folks are below average and some folks are above average and that's just kind of the way it goes.

The same holds true for management - there are bad managers, there are good managers, and there are all the other managers in between. I've had some great managers over the years - my current manager is one of the best in a dozen different ways. The person I am currently challenged by - well, not so much.

Today when I woke up and went through my morning routines, before driving into the office, my monkey mind has seized on this upper manager - not in a particularly stressful way, but in a way where I was moving the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle around, sorting out a variety of incidents and observations and trying to find how they all fit together. As I went through this process during the drive to work I was suddenly struck by...

The absurdity of it. This is an individual who is fairly well qualified (on paper) and middling high up the corporate food chain. But, what it really comes down to is - they're floundering. Their actions are not the actions of a confident leader. They're the actions of someone who is lost and flailing around trying to find something to grab hold of. Now, in corporate terms, that doesn't make them any less dangerous - anytime upper management starts flailing, pieces can get broken.

The trick to the game of corporate survival is to try not to be one of the pieces that gets broken in the flailing. Most of the time, once you're aware of it, you can dodge it, stay nimble, and move through the subsequent chaos. Sometimes a random bit of flailing will take a piece of you and sometimes that random bit of flailing will knock you entirely out of the corporation. That is just the way it goes - fate, at its finest.

I firmly believe there is a force that moves through the universe (I call it God, or the Mystery, being Catholic). I think there is a plan and sometimes we get glimpses of that plan and other times part of it are sprung on us. I've been working for thirty plus years - I've been successful, by my own terms and to a degree by societal terms, everywhere I've worked. If I were to lose my job tomorrow, konked by a random flail, I would do what I have pretty much always done - thrive.

That is the absurdity of worrying about it. First, most of it is beyond my choice - I can only make the choices I make, according to things I value. How other people choose to react is beyond me. The choices they make I can, maybe, marginally influence. Wherever this path goes, whatever twists and turns it makes in the course of that journey - I have faith in The Plan. It is absurd to be overly concerned about the flailing of one upper manager. What happens to them will be according to their own little version of The Plan. (Isn't pre-destination a wonderful tool for us to find a modicum of peace in a turbulent world?)

So, today, struck by the absurdity of what I am observing, I spent most of the day working on the tasks in front of me, being present in the moment, and laughing as I viewed things through the tinted glasses of absurdist theater that are the best corporate goggles, I found a spot of peace.

The Voice of Dissent or Don't Drink The Kool-Aid

I thought I would take some time this morning and write about something that happened during the week at work, because I think it is a pretty common event. I can't (and won't) go to deep into the details, but first, let me lay out the general scenario.

The company has a process that is very unpopular. Approximately 50% of all employees have a negative view of the internal process (as demonstrated on a survey). Since the process is viewed as necessary, the company has undertaken an extensive program to do two things - first, they are changing the process, rather significantly, and second, they are engaging in a widespread communication effort in an attempt to get the employee base to better understand both how the process works and why it is what it is. It's a noble effort in my opinion. I think it has a fifty-fifty chance of success, better if implemented well, worse if not implemented well. (On my cynical days I have used the expression - "you can paint a pig silver, but that doesn't make it a jet".)

So, upper management is tasked with addressing the issue of the 50% negative impression of this process. In a meeting with my management team (my peers and my upper management) we went into a long discussion about the existing process and the negative perception.

Now, I've got thirty years work experience, over half of that in supervisor, management or leadership roles within organizations. On top of this broad base of experience I layer both formal education and a lot of self-directed reading. Over the course of this experience I have come to the professional and personal opinion that, when it comes to managing employees, honesty is always the best policy. That includes the issue of being critical of company policy, when those policies are not working, poorly constructed, or poorly implemented.

Inside an organization these voices of criticism are critical to a successful organization. The ability of employees (and managers) to honestly voice their opinions, their perceptions, and their feelings is crucial to employee satisfaction, which in turn leads to higher engagement, higher morale, and higher productivity. For several years now I have been a vocal critic of the particular policy. I've written memos, I have presented my criticisms to upper management, in a variety of one-on-one and group settings. Often, it has felt like a lonely place to be - I've landed in meetings where I seemed to be the lone voice of dissent.

In the management team meeting to discussion the solution (which I think is communication, transparency, honesty and a solid feedback loop) things got - testy. My current director did not respond well to the criticism of the company policy and we ended up, overall, in five hours of meetings, both with the management team and one on one. At the end of this chain of events, I think I finally managed to get my points through, at least I left the last meeting with that feeling (thought I could be entirely wrong).

But it did bring me to the point I wanted to make here - dissent is important to the health of any organization, whether that organization is a company or a family or an informal group - if no one questions to processes of the group, if no one approaches them with a critical eye, then the group runs the very real risk of group-think. In my organization, I think a large reason the bad process did as much damage as it did (to the point where 50% of the people have a negative opinion of the process) was that no one was listening to the early voices of dissent. Now, fixing the process is a key objective of the entire corporation - and it never should have gotten that far. If you listen to the voices of dissent in your organization, if you foster an environment where that level of trust exists, where the rank-and-file members of the organization can opening apply a critical eye to internal processes and feel comfortable bringing those critical opinions and perceptions to their leaders - knowing that those leaders will listen, accept, acknowledge and follow-up on those criticisms as appropriate - then you are going to build a great organization, both from a productive standpoint and from a personal standpoint.

Let me close with a final little anecdote. In the course of the wide ranging and sometimes tense discussion with my upper management, the oblique criticism was leveled at me that I was someone not loyal because I wasn't "presenting the right message" (i.e. a non-critical view) to my team. My upper manager made the comment that she had "drank the kool-aid", by which she meant that she understood, accepted, and was completely loyal to the company. I responded "not only didn't I drink the Kool-Aid, I don't drink the Kool-Aid, ever". It let to a tense couple of moments. I've rarely been as far out of step with upper management as I find myself with this particular one. I am hoping this conversations, and others, lead us to find a place where we can compromise and understand each other. I am skeptical, but then keep in mind that I generally a highly skeptical guy.